Nobody is Normal

Saturday, March 24th, 2018

Normal is a relative state that depends on time, place, and circumstance. There’s no one right way to be a human, and that applies to mental as well as physical states.

Uniformity in our brains is totally abnormal. What’s much more common in life, during its 3.5 billion years of evolving existence on Earth, is range and change, variety in and among creatures and habitats.

Evolution is about crafty adaptability, changing with conditions and times. Because all things, from trees to families, countries, and continents, are in a state of flux, the only constant state is a constantly transforming one. This means that any one behavior or condition may seem good or bad, appropriate or inappropriate, depending on the context.

Trying to define people one way from a psychiatric perspective is a failure of imagination and opportunity, which hobbles people rather than empowering them to inhabit their full selves. The world is inherently wide-ranging.

This is a quantum approach to psychiatry, rather than the classic binary approach that offers only two options, ones and zeros. In computing terms, the quantum approach considers countless entangled factors in tandem to solve a single problem in an extremely sophisticated way, while the digital computer thinks in “ones” and “zeros,” and presents solutions that are the same old problems. This more complicated system doesn’t attempt to know individual bits of random information in isolation, but to understand all as a whole.

There is no fixed normal. There’s a level of variability in every one of our behaviors, and any behavior is neither solely negative or solely positive. There are potential benefits for both, depending on the context you’re placed in. Barring obvious dysfunction and misery, you are almost certainly way more normal than you think you are. Or to put it differently, you’re weird, but so is everyone else.

Summing-up: We’re all a little bit weird, but being weird is, in fact, totally normal. We need to recognize the importance of variability, both in ourselves and in the people around us.